In the drilling, completions, production, transport, storage, and processing of crude oil and natural gas, including waste water associated with crude oil and gas production, and in the storage of residual fuel oil, contaminants are often encountered. Such contaminants may include, but are not necessarily limited to, ammonia, primary, secondary and tertiary amines, hydrogen sulfide (H2S), mercaptans, sulfides, and/or cyanides. Under suitable conditions, ammonia and organic amines tend to combine with hydrogen halides to form corrosive deposits on the internal surfaces of refinery units, especially in the overhead system, which can lead to serious operation failure due to the acidic nature of these deposits. Such failure can be disastrous, with consequences that may include not only the loss of production, but also the loss of life. Thus, properly managing these deposits is important. Further, the presence of H2S and mercaptans is extremely objectionable because they are an acute health hazard and often highly corrosive. Still another reason that mercaptans are undesirable is that they have highly noxious odors. The odors resulting from mercaptans are detectable by the human nose at comparatively low concentrations and are well known. For example, mercaptans are used to odorize natural gas and used as a repellant by skunks and other animals.
Further, other of these contaminants in hydrocarbon and/or water systems may cause various health, safety and environmental (HSE) concerns and/or corrosion issues during the production, storage, transportation and processing of oil and gas.
To eliminate these contaminants and potentially harmful species, various scavenger systems have been developed in the art. However, many of these systems have limitations, including, but not necessarily limited to, low reactivity and therefore low efficiency, containing atypical components or elements that may adversely affect fuel or fluid quality, or may present toxicity concerns themselves and/or as the consequent reaction products.
It would be desirable if methods and/or compositions could be devised that would remove, reduce, eliminate, take out or otherwise remove such contaminants from these hydrocarbon and/or aqueous streams, as well as reduce, alleviate or eliminate corrosion caused by these undesired contaminants.